All posts for the month January, 2016

Hey guys I’m going to write about globtop game cartridges, and whether or not you should get them.

In case you don’t know, there are two main kinds of famiclone game boards. EPROMs are the kind of board that Nintendo used in all of their official cartridges. Here’s a picture of a pirate EPROM game board:

And here’s a picture of a globtop cartridge:

As you can see, EPROM boards are bigger, and they have big, visible chips. Speaking of which, where are the chips on the globtop game? Well, globtops use very tiny chips, and they’re covered in this black hardened goo stuff to keep them in place. From what I’ve read, these carts are supposed to die quicker, but none of mine have stopped working, including one that’s 20 years old.

Moving on, globtops are cheaper to make, and pretty much all modern famiclone games use globtops.

Does it really matter? Well, that depends on two main things. First is whether or not you’re worried about the game dying, and second off is whether or not your famiclone (if you have one) will run them.

Yeah, some famiclones won’t run globtops. Official Famicom systems won’t, either. (I mean, that’s not completely true. Every once in a while you’ll get a globtop that will run on an official Famicom, but most of the time that won’t happen.) Here’s a picture of what happens if you try to run a globtop game in a system that doesn’t support globtops:

Whether or not a famiclone will run a globtop games depends on whether or not it uses the NOAC chip. (NOAC stands for NES On AChip.)

One way to tell is to open up your famiclone with a screwdriver and see what chips it uses. But you should be careful, since last time I tried opening a famiclone, some pieces started falling out. I was able to put them back in, and now it works, but you should still be careful.

A less risky way is to go and buy some cheapo globtop game and see if it runs. That costs money, but still, the chance of breaking your famiclone is zero.

But how do you tell if a cartridge is a globtop?

Well, not very easily. Here’s two cartridges. One is an EPROM and one is a globtop. Can you tell?

Well, probably you couldn’t, unless you read my previous posts about these two cartridges. But anyway, you can’t tell by looking at the cover.

One source said that globtops are noticeably lighter. Well, I went and weighed my two globtop cartridges, as well as some non-globtop cartridges, and here are the results:

Globtops:

1.1 ounces.

1.2 ounces.

EPROMS:

1.2 ounces.

1.2 ounces.

1.6 ounces.

1.2 ounces.

With the exception of the third EPROM cart I weighed, none of these are “noticeably different.”

But, if you ripped out the circuitboard and weighed that, it would be noticeably lighter. My only loose EPROM board weighed 0.5 ounces, and a randomly selected loose globtop board weighed 0.1 ounce.

Most people probably don’t want to go and rip open their cartridges, though, and if you’re going and buying one, the seller probably isn’t going to want to do that either. How else can you tell?

Well, you can’t do that very easily. One thing you can try is looking for any openings in the cartridge, and looking for any globtop chips.

Yeah, other than that, you can’t really tell.

If you want to play a globtop game and your famiclone doesn’t, you’ll have to go and buy another famiclone running off an NOAC chip.

One good way to get a NOAC famiclone is to get a plug-and-play famiclone, like a Power Joy. Those are smaller, and because of that the publisher probably had to put in an NOAC chip in order to get an NES to fit in the system.

Hi guys! Remember Pandamar? That hack of Super Mario Bros where Mario’s a panda? Well they changed a lot of other graphics too.

After noticing that a hack of Pandamar, Pka Chu, had the message for when you complete a castle changed. I wondered if it was changed in Pandamar, too, so I looked into it. And since I’m making a post about that, I figured I’d just go ahead and get some pictures of a lot of the graphical changes.

Hi everyone! Like a month ago I bought this multicart, but it took a month to come in the mail! But it’s here now, so now you can read about it.

First off, here’s the cartridge:

It’s shaped kinda like a Nintendo 64 cartridge.

The label is the same size as an N64 cartridge label, even though it doesnt really fit very well on the cartridge.

Before anybody asks about it I’m gonna say that the bottom right of the cartridge was NOT broken by me. It was broken by a previous owner of this cartridge. But to be fair to the previous owner, the publisher of this game made it out of pretty cheapo plastic. But to be fair to the publisher, they were making knockoff games, and you can make more money off of a knockoff by making it out of cheapo plastic. MOVING ON.

Here’s what’s on the label, in case you can’t read that low-quality printing label that this cart has:

•The word “function”
•A cat teacher or something teaching addition at a blackboard
•A picture of the letters ABC and a bunch of basic arithmetic symbols
•A picture of a CRT TV saying “Study English”
•A picture of this cat character guy

Yeah I don’t know who this cat with a hat is supposed to be, but I’ve seen him on the labels for a bunch of educational keyboard famiclones that are mostly supposed to help you learn English. You guys aren’t going to get any use out of that though, since you already know how to read English. Judging by the label, this seems to be something like one of those educational computer things.

But never judge a book bootleg knockoff game cart by it’s cover. They are very, very, VERY unreliable. Would you have guessed by the cover that this game:

1999 6-in-1 Multicart

that it has Tetris on it? No? Well would you have guessed that our “educational” game cartridge we have here isn’t educational at all, it’s a MULTICART!?!?

Well, yeah, you probably already knew that, due to the name of this blog post, but whatever, let’s put this thing in my famiclone and see what it does:

Yeah it’s a multicart all right. It’s got some (probably stolen) music, a list of games, an elephant with a blue face, and a circus tent. And like it says, the game menu goes all the way up to 9,999,999:

But it actually has nowhere close to 9,999,999 games on it. It actually just has 6. Most of them are repeats. Here they are:

Pika (I’ll get to that in a minute)

Battle City

Track and Field

Duck Hunt

Galaxian

Circus Charlie

But what about that game called Clay Shooting? That’s Duck Hunt except it automatically starts out in the Clay Shooting mode. What about High Jump, 100M Meter, Javeling throw, etc.? Those are just different modes of Track and Field.

Well, that’s dumb. But in all of this, there’s one thing that’s kind of interesting: That game called Pika. What’s that? Let’s pick that game and see what happens:

First off, this isn’t just a hack of Super Mario Bros. It’s a hack of a hack of a hack of Super Mario Bros.

Yeah, here’s how this all went. First off, one company hacked Super Mario Bros. to change the title screen to look like this:

Hacked Super Mario Bros. Title Screen

They also made it so that the score, instead of saying “Mario” above it, now says “Score,” to avoid copyright problems. Some of the music was also corrupted.

Then later some other company hacked that hack to make Mario into a panda, and they changed most of the rest of the graphics graphics. They also instead of corrupting the music replaced it with a bunch of original music.

And then some other company hacked that to make Pka Chu. Let’s go over some of the changes:

First off (other than the title screen) is that you start off as a Pokéball with legs, as you can see in the picture of the title screen. If you get a mushroom (now replaced with a potion) you will come out of the Pokéball and be a Pikachu:

And also, when you get a fire flower (which is replaced with some other weird graphics I can’t tell what are) you can shoot blue electricity fireballs:

They also made the coins look like this:

And Bowser looks like this:

And when you beat him, you get this:

What is it? This name keeps changing! Pika, then Pka Chu, and now Pi Ka. There are some other graphical changes, too.

Maybe there’s some changed text after you beat Bowser in Pandamar, too. I’ll have to check later.

The other day I was playing Pocket Monster on my 400-in-1 multicart, and I paused the game, and it turns out that when you pause the game, all the bad guys and stuff keep moving across the screen, while your character stays in place. Well, that’s kinda weird, but what do you expect from a pirate game?

Well guess what? That’s not all! You can move your character around the screen with the D-pad, in the air, through the walls, and everything! And then you can unpause the game at any point and Pikachu will show up there. Weird, huh?

You can basically just use this to cheat through all the levels, but that’s cheating, and you shouldn’t do it.

Yeah, I dunno why Super Game didn’t even bother to take out the debug mode, but it’s still there. If you wanna cheat at Pocket Monster, now’s your chance.

I never wrote about it on my website (except for a brief mention on my summary of the Family Game famiclone) because it uses compressed graphics. In case you don’t know what that means, I’ll explain it.

At some point, companies started making famiclones using a 1-chip computer called the NOAC (NES On AChip) instead of reproducing all of the parts of an actual Famicom. They started doing this because it’s cheaper, and now most modern famiclones use the NOAC chip.

The NOAC is a pretty accurate copy of Famicom hardware (although not as good as reproducing all the original chips), but it’s not perfect. I’ve heard that the graphics can have their colors glitched up sometimes. Another difference is that it is now possible to compress the graphics on the game cartridge, and have them show up normally on the TV screen.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t work on original famicoms. If you try it, you’ll end up with something like this:

All the music and gameplay will act normally, but it will be hard to figure out what’s going on due to the messed up graphics.

But if you put these cartridges in a NOAC famiclone, everything will act normally. Here’s the game select screen on my Super Game 3-in-1:

The list of games is a little different than the label and game select. The actual games are:

Hey guys! Recently I went and got my second famiclone, the Power-Joy Classic TV Game:

I know that it says “Power-Joy” instead of “Power Joy II”. In fact, the packaging (which I don’t have) doesn’t say “Power Joy II” either. But this model was marketed as the Power Joy II. There was an earlier model that was advertised as just Power Joy, though. But the only difference is the included multicart (which I’ll get to in a minute).

The publisher of this thing (Trump Grand Ltd.) was obviously trying to imitate a Nintendo 64 controller, but it’s a little different.

Alright, here’s the way the buttons are mapped on the power joy:

D-Pad: Same as the D-Pad on the normal Famicom/NES.Analog Stick: Acts as an additional D-Pad.The buttons that correspond to the N64’s C pad: A, B, autofire A, and Autofire B.The higher up purple button: Start.The lower down purple button: Select.Button in the middle of the controller: Restart button.The switch in the middle: The power switch.

It also has a light gun build right in. Let’s look at the back:

At the bottom it has a port for a second controller (which I don’t have). And also, see that button there that would correspond to the Z button on an N64 controller? That’s the zapper gun trigger. And here’s the end you’re supposed to point at the TV:

Moving on, the thing is powered off of four AAA batteries. I’ve heard some other people on the internet say it runs off of AA batteries, but mine definitely doesn’t.

I’ve also heard that there is an adapter that lets it be plugged into the wall, but I don’t have it.

If you turn it on, this little LED lights up:

Now to hook it up to the TV. It has hardwired AV cables, so I don’t have to go around trying to find any. That’s pretty neat. If you turn it on without a cartridge (which as you’ve probably guessed plugs into the back of the controller) then you’ll find that the Power Joy has a multicart built right in:

(I should point out that some other models of the Power Joy don’t have the same multicart built in. I’ll be talking about the multicart built into mine.) Hm, it says 10-in-1, and it has some music playing in the background. If you press a button, it will take you to the game select screen:

Well, let’s start up the first game, Shoot Copter 100. It doesn’t have a title screen, and you’ll get taken directly into the gameplay:

It’s a hack of Tengen’s Tetris. They changed the title screen to look like this and they also changed the background colors and they changed the blocks to have different shapes:

Hm. That’s weird. Let’s try out Shoot Copters 300. Well, it turns out to just be the same as Shoot Copter 100, except there are two helicopters onscreen at once. I’m not going to put a picture here, since it’s basically the same game. Next off is Panzer Fly Car 400:

It is probably a hack of some Famicom racing game, but whatever it is, I haven’t played it.

The next game is Debar Bomb 1 500:

It’s a hack of Hogan’s Alley.

On to the next game, Shooting 600. It’s a hack of some famicom light gun game where you have to shoot a bunch of airplanes to make them bounce higher into the air, and you have to keep them all off the ground in order to win. My phone isn’t focusing on the TV because the background is all black, so I’m sorry but you can’t have any screenshots.

On to the next game, Debar Bomb 2 701.

It’s another hack of Hogan’s Alley, with the same things you are supposed to shoot.

On to Future Tank 802:

It’s a hack of Battle City! Remember Tank A 1990, the other hack of Battle City? Well, this was hacked by the same company, Yanshan Software, and it’s a hack of the same game.

I guess you play as beetles that have guns? Or something? Tank bugs? I dunno.

Moving on to the next game, Space War 903:

Sounds like Star Wars, but it’s no. It’s a hack of some Namco game. (I don’t remember the name of it. I’ll write here if I can remember the name of the game)

Onto the next and final game, Shoot 000.

It’s another hack of Duck Hunt.

Well, those built-in games were interesting, but what might be more interesting is the multicart that the thing comes with.

This is how you tell if you have a Power Joy I or a Power Joy II. The Power Joy I has a 64-in-1 cartridge and the ID number is PJ-001. This multicart has lots of repeats of the games. The Power Joy II has an 84-in-1 multicart with fewer repeats and an ID number of PJ-008. There are actually two different known versions of the PJ-008 cartridge, which have identical labels but slightly different selections of games. Anyway, I’m writing about my copy. Here’s the game select screen:

Here’s the list of games (titles listed exactly as they are in the menu, including typos):

80 Days

1942

Arkanoid

Aladdin III (hack of Magic Carpet 101, not Hummer Team’s game.)

Argus

Adisland

Ascii

Arabian

Badminton

Baltron

B-Wings

Balloon Fight

Bird Week

Boomman (I think that this is a hack of Bomberman)

Brush Roller

Clay Shoot

Chack and Pop

Circus Charlie

City Connection

Challenger

Dig Dug

Dough Boy

Druaga

Devil World

Dingdong

Door Door

Dynamite Brawl

Elevator Action

Exertion

Formation Z

Front Line

Fire Dragon

Flappy

Flippull

Field Combat

Galaga

Galg

Geimos

Gyrodine

Gotcha

Galaxians

Gradius

Hyper Olympic

Joust

Karateka

Kage

Lode Runner

Lunar Ball

Macross

Magic Jewellry (pirate original)

Magmax

Mappy

Millipede

Ninja Fighter

Ninja II

Nuts and Milk

Othello

Pooyan

Pac Land

Pandamar (hack of Super Mario Bros. that I’ll get to in a minute)

Penguin

Route 16

Raid on Bay

Road Fighter

Soccer

Sky Destroyer

Space Et

Star Gate

Star Force

Son Son

Spartan

Spelunker

Spy vs. Spy

Sqoon

Star Luster

Tag Team

Tank

Twin Bee

Wrestling

Wrecking Crew

Wisdom

Warp Man

Xevious

Zippy Race

Most interesting of all of this is Pandamar. It’s a hack of a hack of Super Mario Bros. There was a hack of Super Mario Bros. made by Steepler (who also made a line of famiclones called Dendy) that replaced the title screen and corrupted some of the music. Here’s the title screen:

Hacked Super Mario Bros. Title Screen

Then later on, another company called Inventor hacked that to replace Mario with a Panda and change the Music and change a bunch of the other graphics, too.

That’s the hack that appears on this multicart. There were some other companies that went and made hacks of Pandamar. I bought one, but it hasn’t come in the mail yet. I’ll write about it here when it does.

If you want to play this game, you have two options: Go and buy one, or emulate it. I’ve heard that the ROM for this thing has been dumped, so if you can find the ROM you can play this game on an emulator.

That’s it for now, guys. Bye!

[UPDATE] Oh! I forgot to mention that since this thing runs on NES on a chip technology, so I can play all of my games that use compressed graphics, like my game circuit boards and some other stuff.

[ANOTHER UPDATE] I tested it and the included multicart will run on non-NES on a chip famiclones.

I’m pretty sure nintendo never actually saw or approved this product, but moving on, the left and right sides of the box both look like this:

“Ensamblado en Venezuela.” -> “Assembled in Venezuela.”

And here’s the back of the box:

It’s got a bunch of screenshots of different games, and it says “Nintendo Entertainment System®.”

The top and bottom of the box both look like this:

Well, that’s it for what the boxes look like. I should probably mention that these aren’t the original boxes, though. Some company in Venezuela got ahold of some cartridges from Taiwan and put their own boxes on them. But anyway, here are the cartridges (there isn’t anything else in the box):

Was $4

These are FAMICOM games! Not Nintendo Entertainment System games!! NES games look WAAYYY different! But whatever, I don’t have anything that will play NES games anyway, so it’s a good thing that these are Famicom games.

The artwork for both of these are identical to the labels on the box. The Venezuelan game publisher made copies of these labels and stuck them on the box. They also put some top labels on the cartridges:

Which are the same labels that the publisher put on the boxes. Anyway, I’m going to start out by talking about the Duck Hunt cartridge:

This game is an unlicensed port of the SNES Aladdin game to the Famicom. It was developed by Hummer Team, which was the same developer that made Somari (the game engine for Aladdin III is based off of the game engine for Somari).

My copy of the game was published by the JY Company, who was the original publisher for some of Hummer Team’s games. Here’s the title screen:

I will get a video of some gameplay at some point, but not right now. Sorry, guys. If you want, you could probably go and find some gameplay on YouTube or somewhere else.

That’s right. I bought a bunch of game boards. Hey, they were just $15 altogether. How bad could it be? The seller said they were all pirates, so I figured that it would be good for my website. Now, the seller said what all the games are, but I’m just going to pretend to be surprised at what they are.

Alright, first off, let’s put this guy in my famiclone and see what happens.

Well, it’s got a bunch of glitched up graphics and some non-messed-up music.

Wait a second, that’s the music from Pokémon 4-in-1! This cartridge is Pokémon 4-in-1 with messed up graphics. Yeah, some famiclone companies make their cartridges with compressed graphics, which the original famicom hardware doesn’t support. My famiclone uses all the same computer chips as a normal Famicom, so it doesn’t do video compression either. So this Pokémon 4-in-1 board isn’t going to be of any use to me unless I get another famiclone. On to the next board:

This one does this when you turn it on:

Yeah, this one has glitched up graphics too. Is it like that for all of them?

Mostly, yeah. These four use glitched up compressed graphics:

The seller didn’t mention that any of them used compressed graphics. But I don’t really care, eventually I’ll get another famiclone that will run these games. [UPDATE] I got a famiclone that will run them! You can read about it here.

But there are still 3 left. Let’s try this one:

It turns out that it’s Tecmo World Cup Soccer.

Alright, now on to the two most interesting of all these seven game boards. These are two pirate original (that just means that they were programmed from scratch by pirate game developers) games. They were developed and published in Russia by a company called A.Chudov. One of them is a multicart featuring two puzzle games. One called Balda and one called Pyatnashki What’s extremely annoying though, is that my copy crashes and restarts as soon as it gets to the level select screen. It has a title screen (yes, the multicart has a title screen) though, so I can give you a picture.

Like I said, it gets to the level select screen for like half a second before crashing and restarting, but I was able to get a picture with just the right timing to see the level select. Here it is:

The seller says “first game similar to scrabble, the second is the 15-puzzle,” but I can’t prove it since my copy keeps crashing.

Anyway, here’s the second game. It actually boots up and plays! It’s a Russian text editor. The problem is though, it requires you go through a bunch of menus in order to pick the letter you want, and anyway the whole thing is pointless for me because I can’t speak Russian.

Here’s the title screen:

And here’s a picture of some gameplay text editing:

It’s pretty interesting to have a sort of word processor on the Famicom, but again I don’t speak Russian and can’t get much use out of it.

Hey guys, I forgot to do a Christmas special, so I’m making it a New Year’s Day! But I actually forgot about that, and I’m making it on New Year’s Night. Yeah sorry about that but I’m writing about it before midnight, so whatever.

Anyway, my Christmas special is about a NiceCode game called Mad Xmas.

I understand that NiceCode isn’t the greatest pirate game developer. I know that there are other cartridges that would have been better for a New Year special. But I don’t have any of them. Mad Xmas is my only winter holiday themed pirate game. Maybe I’ll have something better next year, but no promises.

Here’s a the title screen of Mad Xmas:

Here’s how Mad Xmas works: Santa is apparently throwing a tantrum, and he’s sitting up in a cloud(??) throwing a bunch of stuff down onto earth, including all of the presents! You’re an elf, and you have to catch all of the wrapped presents, roller skates, candy canes, hard candies, and more. But what else is he throwing down? Oh, nothing. Just LIGHTNING BOLTS AND DEMONS AND BOMBS!!!(???). Is this really Santa, or is it some evil Santa imposter who’s trying to destroy the Earth? I don’t know, but if you collect some of these then you either lose some points or you lose a life. THANKS A LOT, SANTA.

Anyway, here’s some gameplay. (Sorry for the bad quality, but I’m not going to record another video right now because it’s 9:20 PM)

(In the off chance that you are watching this video a couple minutes after I upload this post, you might not see the video since YouTube is still processing it).

I hope you liked this Christmas/New Year special, and I’m sorry if you didn’t. If you want to play this game, it’s included on the CoolBoy 400-in-1 multicart, so if you want to play this, that’s one of your best options.